


into the woods (and right back out, please)

by IuvenesCor



Series: Old Works and WIPs [3]
Category: Portal (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Medieval, Human Wheatley, Humor, Questing, pure silliness, sort of a permanent WIP but also sort of finished?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-22
Updated: 2020-11-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:07:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27674479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IuvenesCor/pseuds/IuvenesCor
Summary: The worst thing, perhaps, was knowing what would be coming, but not knowing when or where. He’d rather be prepared; he’d rather face his death like a man. Or not face his death at all, preferably.(Of Wheatley, woods, and worrying.)
Series: Old Works and WIPs [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2022838
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7





	into the woods (and right back out, please)

He was in the thick of the forest, God help him.

What sense was there in sending a defenseless messenger into a forest— a dark, foreboding wood full of miry pits and rabid creatures and wild barbarians? Wheatley could never understand those of royal blood, what with their decreeing upon whims and treating inferiors like meat-shields. (Really, the king— may he ever be respected and honored— had no sense of common decency when it came to the physical well-being of his subjects, had he?) 

The man supposed it was his duty, of course; if he hadn’t gone, he might have very well lost his head over the matter. But the nature of the responsibility was more than slightly unfair for a spindly, unarmed man with no background in protecting himself.

And _why_ did they have to send him galumphing over and through the mountains to this horribly dim forest? There was a path— a railed path, even!— up the mountains, but downhill was nothing but sticks and stones and the potential for so many broken bones that he cringed to think about it. There were paladins and brutes and witless wanderers better suited to the job all over the kingdom; though they may not have possessed Wheatley’s approachability and sheer charm, why in the name of sanity did he have to be liaison to the dark tribes of the forest? 

Yes, they were particularly good at slaying witches, and the kingdom certainly had a witchy problem in this mysterious (and perhaps slightly illiterate, or at the very least, sketchy with her capitalization) GLaDOS. But he’d heard stories about those tribes, he had: some of them were savages, absolute savages, murdering, even burning alive, their victims! And the stories went on, describing at gruesome length their blood-curdling war cries, and their black magic, and their crafty hunting tactics.

Wheatley wondered, maybe— maybe the castle was just trying to be rid of him? But why? He’d done nothing wrong. Well, small, tiny, miniscule, insignificant wrongs. But nothing to send him on a suicide mission over! 

So he made up his mind: he’d have to show them. Show that over-inflated monarchy there was more to little old Wheatley than met the eye. He had to succeed.

… But then again, he wasn’t very confident in his odds. One Wheatley (and a pointy little branch he had picked up along the way) against a horde of savages. Those odds could stand to be just a smidge more optimistic.

The worst thing, perhaps, was knowing what would be coming, but not knowing when or where. He’d rather be prepared; he’d rather face his death like a man. Or not face his death at all, preferably. 

“You know,” he called out, continuing the conversation he’d been inconsistently holding with the big, angry savage that he was _convinced_ was hiding around every single tree, “it’d be a lot better for both of us if we just got this over with. You’ve probably got foot-sores, a-and you must be getting snagged on these nasty prickers— horrible things— and your- your _everything_ must be covered in filth, just, caked all over with mud. Inconvenient, and not very attractive. N-not that I’m saying you’re hideous. For all I know, you could be a very handsome bloke. Or lady. Might be a handsome lady— no, nope, not handsome, _pretty_. Gorgeous, even. Or, I mean, handsome, if you prefer, I dunno. It’s modern times. But I wouldn’t know that, would I? ‘Cause I can’t see you, with all your muddy camouflage and that. So, yeah. Anyway. Hunting me must be… boring. Really boring, actually, just… walking slowly. Not running or hiding or anything. Just walking. It— you know what? It might actually entertain you more to hunt something else, now that I think about it. That’s it! Purely for the sake of your own self-interest, you should just hunt something else! Like a deer! Or a unicorn! Oh- oh, all right, maybe not— heh, not a _unicorn._ But you caught that drift, I’m sure. It’ll be a blast. Go, go ahead; have fun!

“A-all right, you, you probably don’t care, do you? Look, I don’t want any trouble. I’m just… on a mission; I’ve got a task and it’s very important, can’t really fail it. But if something I’m doing in the process of my quest is offending you, then maybe you should come out! And… we’ll have a chat about it! Be friendly, courteous. Tell you what, I’ll be your friend! And then you wouldn’t have to stalk me! I’m sure you’d make a great friend. It’d be a lovely time.”

Wheatley sighed into the silence that trailed behind his words. He really needed to improve his negotiating skills once he got out of this mess. Though, if he was right, and he could bore the hypothetical woodland stalker…

 _SWISH!_ went something to his left. After a less than respectable scream (which he had to smother with his hand), he gathered his wits and stood very, very straight. Perhaps if he, twiggy as he was, mimicked a tree, then—

 _CLASH!_ went something else. He twitched, struggling to keep his massive, curious eyes shut tight enough. _I want to go back,_ his frantic thoughts muttered within his mind. _I want to go back, I need to go back, don’t care if they chop off my head, just need to go back._

In fact, his thoughts were so loud that it took him nearly a minute to realize that the forest was back to its state of relative silence. Melting out of his frozen pose, he rubbed the back of his neck and chuckled.

“Heh, see that?” he told himself, bashful. “Nothing at all. Just the trees. Nothing in these woods to be— _AUGH!”_

As I’m sure you’re wondering, what had transpired in that brief moment was as follows: upon saying _nothing_ for the second time, he opened his eyes, blinking for good measure. Breathing out the word _woods,_ he casually turned his head to his right, then to his left, assuring himself that there was no large and grotesque thing barreling towards him. As for _be,_ which was meant to be proceeded by _afraid of,_ he was quite shocked to see a streak of black (crowing loudly; possibly a monster, possibly an actual crow, but if anyone asked, definitely a monster) from the corner of his eye; even more shocking was the speed at which it was racing in the direction of his face.

Of course, the scream of _AUGH!_ was the crucial transition wherein he went from ‘serene’ to ‘I’m about to witness my own graphic death’ and entered into a motion that was a hybrid between running, ducking, and frantic arm-waving.

The problem with running and ducking at the same time was the tendency to send oneself into a tripping-and-tumbling sequence, which was precisely the predicament into which Wheatley had tossed himself. He fell down the graded forest floor a little, rolling into sticks and rocks, _oomph_ ing and _ouch_ ing the entire (very short) time. He lost his messenger bag, which he couldn’t possibly do without, unless whatever came after him was _still_ coming after him, at which point he could do without basically anything excepting his life. He also lost a shoe: more of an annoyance than he expected it to be, even while rolling (slightly) down a hill.

He came to a halt with a final _ugh!_ In the last of his inertia, one of his spindly legs knocked into a tree stump, for which he was not grateful. He winced gratuitously and laid on his back, perfectly silent, his chest bobbing up and down with each breath. But eventually, to his surprise, as nothing came crashing down from above, he began to laugh again.

“I… am… _alive!”_ he said, smiling in awe. “I survived!” He stuck a finger into the air triumphantly. “Take that, forest! Ha ha! I am— _oh_ — uhm— _ah_ — heh—”

His words trailed off along a similar vein until his lungs emptied. After so victoriously surviving his fall, he certainly did not expect to look over at the tree trunk into which he’d crashed and meet the dark and skeptical eyes of a very human figure crouching behind it. Wheatley stalled, unable to move a single limb, studying the tanned skin and raven hair of the woman— a savage, but was she? She put the fear of death in him, but she didn’t even need to point her fantastic sword at him to do it. All she needed to do was stare at him like _he_ was the strange one.

“H-hi— hello,” Wheatley squeaked, scrambling to say something before the sword got pointed his way. Best to stick to business. “Sorry to just pop down like this, it’s rude, probably. Um, do you know where the nearest village is? It’s just, I— I need to hire a warrior. Well, I don’t need to, but, uh, His- His Majesty the King— may he ever be respected and honored— needs one. A warrior. Someone bulky— courageous. Uh, local legends, one of those would be great, too. The pay is really reasonable and it’s kind of an emergency _and please don’t set me on fire?”_

He wasn’t sure the woman understood him, being a possible savage and all, but she snorted out a laugh all the same.

**Author's Note:**

> Writing in Wheatley’s headspace is simultaneously wondrous and _exhausting_ , wow.
> 
> Another little thing I unburied from back in 2014, when I was doing a sort of mini NaNoWriMo. Completely plotless, but a lot of fun.
> 
> Thanks for reading! <3


End file.
